Saturday 9 June 2012 19.04 EDT
First published on Saturday 9 June 2012 19.04 EDT

In June 1984, having failed to qualify for that year's European Championships, the England football team was on its way back from a friendly match against Brazil. On the flight home that day was the young winger Mark Chamberlain, who had lately become the second black player to score a goal for England. Also on the plane was a mob of England supporters with allegiance to the National Front, who spent much of the flight taunting Chamberlain and John Barnes and Viv Anderson, the three black players in England's squad. The fans were of the vocal opinion that England had in fact won the game against Brazil 1-0, not 2-0, because the wonderful goal scored by John Barnes in the Maracanã stadium didn't count because of the colour of his skin.

Though only 22, Chamberlain, like Barnes and Anderson, had almost become used to that kind of abuse in a professional career that had begun at the age of 16, at Port Vale, where his manager had introduced him as being "like a bloody gazelle... our black jewel". On many Saturday afternoons up and down the country, Chamberlain had subsequently been forced to listen to fans – mostly from the opposition, but occasionally from among his own team's supporters – making monkey calls and pelting him with bananas.

Mark Chamberlain's career never quite took him to the heights that his skill and pace demanded, but one of the things he no doubt takes pride in, watching his son, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, compete at the fearless age of 18 for the England shirt he once wore, is that the pressures his son faces week in, week out have nothing to do with his race. English football has come a long way since the then national manager, Sir Bobby Robson, could be asked in a press conference if he could countenance a team of 11 non-white players. "If the 11 best players in the country were black, that would be my England team," Robson said, in what was considered by some a controversial remark.

That it is impossible to imagine a journalist asking that question today, just as it is impossible to imagine overt racist abuse of Premier League players going unpunished, is a cause for celebration. This season's high-profile controversies surrounding the racist remarks of Liverpool's Luis Suárez to Manchester United's Patrice Evra, and the alleged comments of John Terry, which he denies making, show that the issue has not gone away, but the seriousness with which those allegations have been treated must be applauded.

Sport, we are often told, simply reflects society. But in many ways, English football, with its united front against racial prejudice at the top level of the game, in particular through the Kick it Out! campaign, has been at the vanguard of our increasingly colour-blind society. It is proof of what a culture of zero tolerance and the existence of a critical mass of positive role models can achieve. Though racism is obviously still present in British society, and even in football – where boardrooms and managers' offices don't begin to reflect the diversity of the nation's population – strides have been made. One result of this is that the precociously talented Oxlade-Chamberlain has never had to play in a football stadium in which the kind of abuse that his father had to suffer is remotely acceptable. It is to be hoped that experience does not change for him when England play France in Donetsk in Ukraine tomorrow night.

If Oxlade-Chamberlain does feature in Roy Hodgson's starting XI, it will not be in front of his father, Mark, who has heeded Foreign Office advice on the subject and will not visit a country in which "travellers of Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent and individuals belonging to religious minorities should take special care". The families of England players Theo Walcott and Joleon Lescott will not be there for the same reason.

Ukraine's reputation for intolerance is not restricted to its football fans; it is to be hoped, too, that no British government minister should attend the tournament and be seen to endorse a regime that stands accused of a string of human rights abuses, including the imprisonment of opposition leader and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

The merits of holding a sporting event in countries with such a record can be debated, and the same questions will return for the 2018 World Cup in Vladimir Putin's Russia. The arguments in favour must surely include the hope that greater freedom and tolerance are promoted by example. The interventions of Michel Platini, president of Uefa, and president-elect of Fifa, stopped some way short of such an example last week.

Responding to the suggestion by Manchester City's Italian star Mario Balotelli that he would leave the pitch if racially abused by fans or players, Platini's remarks were ill-judged and feeble. The former French captain suggested that such action would result only in disciplinary measures against the player, without taking the opportunity to emphasise that racist abuse would be dealt with in the strongest terms. Platini, already taking a lead from his mentor, antediluvian Fifa president Sepp Blatter, sought to pre-empt any controversy by distancing himself from responsibility for it. "I don't think there's any more racism in Poland and Ukraine than in France or anywhere else, even in England," he said. "It's not a footballing problem. It's a problem for society. We just try to regulate problems in football."

Platini should know better, not least because the great French teams that followed his own generation were powerful examples of unity and symbolic of a new acceptance of diversity in his country. When Jean Marie Le Pen sneeringly described the World Cup winning side of Zinedine Zidane and Marcel Desailly as full of "foreign players" and "fake Frenchmen", the Front National leader succeeded only in uniting most of the country against him, the football team becoming an unarguable cause celebre for anti-racist sentiment.

Though nobody expects football's international bodies to create social cohesion overnight, to turn a blind eye, for example, to the racial abuse of Dutch players training in Poland on Friday, is another predictable own goal. As our own FA, and the united nations that is the Premier league, has proved, with resolve, and enforceable sanctions, it is possible to change cultures. We hear a lot from football's global elite about its unique power to bring people together; in the coming weeks, the game must live up to its rhetoric.